Page 219 - Media Effects Advances in Theory and Research

208 ROGERS

1986, which fortunately included a battery of questions about the U.S.
space program, (2) a news event diffusion survey of 1,557 respondents
conducted 3 days after the disaster, and (3) a follow-up survey of 1,111
respondents conducted 6 months later, after the report of the Rogers Com-
mission, which investigated the accident, was released. The 1986 news
event attracted spectacular audience attention: 18 hours after the disaster
(which occurred at 10:00 A.M. EST), 95% of U.S. adults had seen television
pictures of the exploding shuttle. Such exposure had strong emotional
effects:

1. Some 90% talked to family members about the accident, and 73%
talked to friends or colleagues at work or at school about the
accident.
2. Some 78% watched all or part of a televised memorial service for
the eight astronauts broadcast from the Johnson Space Center in
Houston.
3. About 6% (more than 10 million adults) attended a local memor-
ial service for the deceased astronauts. In addition, many others
attended regular religious services, which included a prayer for
the Challenger astronauts and their families. Some 54% of the
respondents said they cried or felt like crying.
4. Some 4% contacted their senator or congressman about the acci-
dent, and 1% wrote to NASA or to the U.S. president about the
accident. 10

Compared to the usual news event diffusion study, which only focuses
on the dependent variable of awareness-knowledge of the news event
(DeFleur, 1987; Rogers, 2000), media messages about the 1986 Challenger
disaster had strong effects on the overt behavior of the U.S. public. Fur-
ther, the impact of the Challenger disaster news coverage had a stronger,
long-term effect on the attention of the American public than any of 480
other major news events (including the 1995 O. J. Simpson trial, the 1989
San Francisco earthquake, and the 1995 bombing of the Federal Building
in Oklahoma City). 11

10 Note the evidence of a hierarchy-of-effects (McGuire, 1989) here, with 90% of the respon-
dents talking to someone, 78% watching the televised memorial service, 6% attending a
memorial service, and 1% writing a letter.
11 According to the Times Mirror Center for the People and the Press (now the Pew
Research Center for the People and the Press). Some 75,000 people in 54 national sample sur-
veys were asked which news events they had paid most attention to (according to an AP
press release dated December 29, 1995).